Saudades Trapped in Song

Listening: “Open” by Bruce Cockburn.

Remembering: Life in Austin, driving by myself along Farm-to-Market Routes, watching a state that wasn’t mine slowly grow on me.

I always used to listen to a radio station called KGSR. They played a mix of music totally different from that played by my station of choice back in Albuquerque – Viva 101.7, featuring all the best in Pop en Español. When I moved to Austin, my song horizon widened inadvertently with all the country and folk influence in the city. KGSR was my favorite teacher, and I learned all about Lucinda Williams, Waylon Jennings, Steve Earl and, of course, Willie Nelson.

One day as I was driving to work, a song played on KGSR that immediately resonated with me. I had no clue who the artist was, but there was something about his sad fiddle and earnest singing that perfectly captured how I felt about Austin and everything I’d been through the previous year to get me there. This was my introduction to Bruce Cockburn.

Doing: Writing and editing for the final draft of the feasibility study we’ve just done for FAO. For the last several months we’ve been evaluating different scenarios for the development of the Maputo Green Zones, agricultural belts within the city where some 15,000 smallholder producers grow vegetables for local markets and their own consumption. Currently all production and sales by the smallholders are on a very informal basis. We looked at different ways FAO can support the Green Zones producers to organize their production and establish market linkages, thus increasing their incomes and improving nutritional status.

Realizing: That I am starting to really like Mozambican / Angolan music. Rico and I bought a little boom box the other day and have been listening to the radio quite a bit recently, a first for both of us. I’ve always loved Afro-Pop songs, but some of the passada, zouk and marrabenta styles that are so popular here were very slow to grow on me. Sort of the same way I absolutely hated most pagode songs in Brasil until having a fabulous time at Carnaval with a group of friends and actually establishing cool memories to go along with those songs in my head.

I think it’s a definitive point when, as an expatriate, I actually start liking the music of the country where I’m living. It is usually a sign that some subtle internal balance has shifted, adapted to the fact that “home” is now in a different geographical location. It’s a sign that I’ve stopped totally evaluating my life in a new country through the lens of an outsider. I’m ready to hear songs not as a manifestation of a novel, exotic culture that I don’t understand, but as a catalyst for memories of caipirinhas with the girls, long days with Rico sweating in our non-air-conditioned home office, and occasionally, if it’s just the right rhythm and sweet lyric, of the way I’ll one day look back on the time I spent in Mozambique, a foreshadowing of the saudades sure to come.